Friendship Refresh is a nerf to Memories

[purplemur]

This isn’t about the time saved unlocking the disk.This isn’t about no more Auxiliary chars needed to run missions. This isn’t about auto-Success missions. This isn’t about auto-Collecting rewards. All that is great but; Do not bring those in here: they are off-topic.
This is about the Memory acquisition rate.
This refresh is an huge nerf to friendships because of the timer and restrictions on # of missions for memories.

84 hours = 2 memories.
You are limited to 3 missions.
No more +5memories for leveling up Missions.

Makes me sad that the much needed UI refresh came with this resource throttling&future paywall (Speed-up timers and Memories will be the new monetary squeeze).
Pre-refresh/currently: at best: 2 memories every 10 hours. Devs took problem of it taking too long to make friendships worthwhile and removed the major hurdles, yet for this prize we Now must pay 84 hours. Think of how long that is= 3.5 days for 2 memories. Month and a half to get 25 memories for first star.
This is a an example of gaslighting/goalpost moving to say:
“Once every 4 days you shall get what you used to get twice a day because we do not want you to benefit from the new improvements”
Once we acknowledge this tremendous shift THEN can we discuss the complete failure of the timer reduction system. It needs to be mentioned how bad the self-made problem is before rushing to say how good the solution could be.
Post-refresh : At the very best: 2 friends being both R12(6*) fully skill maxxed it will now take 14 hrs.
40% worse. For the very top end players on the very earliest servers. Those rates don’t get better for anyone else. This is strictly worse.

Someone runs over your foot deliberately to sell you a cane (that is too short) is a bad business model!
Please, please please rethink this scheme. I used to spend on this game regularly but have totally soured and stopped based on my treatment as a customer on S22 and decisions like this absurd 84 hours is doubling-down on player disenfranchisement. I don’t spend money where the servings get smaller as the menu gets expensive whilst also being treated like my business is some kind of benefit I am getting from them. I don’t need to eat/drink/play here if that is how I am going to be treated.
I am one foot out the door and if every one of your game upgrades comes with a stealth regression tied to crass monetizing then I can very easily find a similar type game with similar license. Some game developers make improvements strictly for quality’s sake and to keep the customers engaged: improving the UX in itself will cause players to spend, don’t need forced scarcity to pressure sales.
This is a good opportunity for an expression of goodwill; I would break my strike and make a supportive purchase if I saw some kind of positive outreach from the company about the game being steered in the right direction- however the managers seem to be ignoring the danger klaxons and this is headed for icebergs to try and squeeze quarterly earnings.

[Enchanter_Flower_XXVIII]

Very well said. there’s so much good in this refresh but this one bottleneck is enough to make it bad overall especially for f2p or light spending players who were diligently running memory missions around the clock. The game continues to shift towards p2p.

[Escanor_TheOne]

U spoke my mind. Definitely not happy with the base 84 hrs for 2 memories. It’s not correct. I have seen players with 5 star disks on a completely new player only after 2,3 days. These players will benefit the same or even more so with this refresh. While I with my toons barely r5,6 will be at incredible disadvantage. With this system after the grind it was easier to get the disk at 3 stars. From what I read it feels it will be an even longer wait now. Having a disk at 1* isn’t really great. So it looks like the condition for f2p and light paying players will remain same or even worsen now.

[PawpsicleSticks]

every one of your game upgrades comes with a stealth regression tied to crass monetizing

Absolutely. Literally every time PB does something positive, there’s something crappy and monetization-aggressive included in the back end that prevents the game from ever being decent. I’m beginning to think it’s intentional.

[Rose_S21]

They do state that the memory missions can get as short as 14 hours based on mission speed (for R12), which is calculated based on how “built” each of the friendship heroes is. Presumably you would build at least ONE of the friendship heroes… so it would probably work out to about 2 days if you maxed one and left the other at 1* lvl 1 rank white.

I just don’t want people thinking that 84 hours is the flat mission time - it’s not.

[Jody_Caviness]

Yeah, the 84 hours is the base time, and it looks to decrease pretty rapidly. Quoting the examples from the original post:

Friendship Refresh Overview

• Two maxed Purple+0 Heroes have about +133% Mission Speed, completing Memory Missions in about 36 hours and Disk Power Missions in 9 hours
• Two maxed Orange+0 Friends will have about +198% Mission Speed, completing Memory Missions in about 28 hours and Disk Power missions in 7 hours
• Two maxed Red+12 Friends will have about +498% Mission Speed, completing Memory Missions in about 14 hours and Disk Power Missions in 3.5 hours.

Which isn’t terribly representative, since who the heck has maxed Purple and Orange heroes, but it does help show just how quickly that base time of 84 hours is reduced. I’m guessing that, typically, heroes in the R6-R9 range will probably take 18 or so hours to finish a mission, maybe a bit less.

Still, the point remains that, even for heroes at the current server max, the new system will still be slower than the old (or maybe roughly equivalent, taking into account being able to start the process a little earlier); I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect things to be a little faster, especially for newer/less-developed players still working through the orange ranks. I’ve been spending a little time with an extra account that was created on S2 back when the game started, but which I didn’t start using until around the start of this year; this change may cause me to stop toying around with that account, since it’s going to take so much longer to develop disks for purple and orange heroes.

[Hypersayia]

And to add to it all, I want to remind people that this also affects new players on the server.

Someone could get their first disk and have to wait an absurd amount of time to rank it up, and they can’t do much to speed it all up.

There are good parts to it, but I think that the timelimit should be a case of “would take about 15-ish hours if both heroes were maxed relative to the level of friendship unlock”, so older disks can be done faster.

For example, using Maui and Genie, that’s level 90, that would be O0, if memory is correct, so that’ll be a collective acceleration of 2( 0.75(6) + 3(11) + 0.2(90) + 0.05(90+90+70+50)) = 141%

So, speed of 241% to reach 15 hours, makes base mission length of about 36 hours, if I’m making any sense.